Albert King: Born Under A Bad Sign (180g) [CRAFT]

Why you'll love it

This 180g Craft reissue marks Albert King's centennial, with all-analog mastering from the original stereo tapes by Jeff Powell and a heavy tip-on jacket. The album sits in the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• All-analog mastering from the original stereo tapes
• Tip-on jacket
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Albert King was 43, with one modest hit to his name, when he signed to Stax in 1966, and Stax had the best house band in America. Across five sessions over the next year he cut these songs with Booker T. & the M.G.'s and the Memphis Horns; Jim Stewart is credited as producer, though trumpeter Wayne Jackson remembered Steve Cropper and Al Jackson Jr. really running the room.

King played a right-handed Flying V left-handed without restringing it, pulling the strings down instead of pushing them up, which let him bend several at once into that huge, crying tone. The title song, written for him by Booker T. Jones and William Bell around an unusual ten-bar line, became a standard almost overnight. "Crosscut Saw," "Laundromat Blues" and "The Hunter" are all-timers too, and side two stretches out into slower numbers like "The Very Thought of You."

Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Mike Bloomfield and Stevie Ray Vaughan all took notes, and Cream covered the title song the very next year. Jackson also said King's guitar was always out of tune with everything else, but he was strong enough to bend the notes back in, which is a more muscular approach to tuning than we've ever managed at the listening station.

Also at Kops: more Albert King on vinyl · browse Blues

Tracklist

Listen

On Stax / Craft Recordings, a reissue of the 1967 album.